It gave the world its best-known pop group: now Liverpool is putting itself on the stage. The city’s selection as Europe’s “Capital of Culture” for 2008 means a year-long arts festival that will bring tens of thousands of extra visitors – and no city could want a better opportunity to showcase a remarkable, but incomplete, economic revival.

Liverpool will be entering its 801st year as a city when Ringo Starr, the Beatles’ former drummer, takes to the stage in January to launch the Capital of Culture celebrations. This is one of the UK’s oldest and most important urban centres, a rival to Glasgow as the “second city of the British empire”. Yet during recent decades it was drifting and derided: losing jobs, businesses and people, Liverpool was an easy shorthand for British industrial decline, social problems and political strife.